By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
MOSCOW/KYIV/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – People in Russia’s southwestern Rostov region awoke Saturday with a significant oil depot on fire following a massive Ukrainian attack. It was the latest long-range strike by Ukrainian forces on a border area inside Russia.
Ukraine has stepped up aerial assaults on Russian soil, targeting refineries and oil terminals to slow down the Kremlin’s war machine.
It comes as Moscow’s army is pressing hard along the front line in eastern Ukraine, where a shortage of troops and ammunition in the third year of war has made defenders vulnerable.
Rostov regional Governor Vasily Golubev said the drone attack caused a blaze spanning 200 square meters (2,100 square feet), but there were no casualties. Golubev announced that the fire was extinguished after several hours.
Additionally, Moscow claimed that two Ukrainian drones were being intercepted over the Rostov region while Russian air defense systems overnight also destroyed two other drones over the country’s western Kursk and Belgorod regions.
The Ukrainian attacks were in apparent retaliation for deadly Russian strikes on Ukrainian territories: Vadym Filashkin, the Ukrainian governor of the partly occupied eastern Donetsk region, said Saturday that Russian attacks on Friday had killed six people and wounded a further 22.
Oleksandr Prokudin, governor of Ukraine’s Kherson region, which is also partly occupied by Russia, said Saturday that one person had been killed and six wounded as a result of Russian shelling over the previous day.
INTERCEPTING DRONES
Yet elsewhere, military officials reported some success, with Ukraine’s air defenses intercepting four of five drones launched by Russia overnight. The fifth drone reportedly left Ukrainian airspace in the direction of Belarus, a close ally of Russia.
However, the attacks and counter-attacks have underscored concerns about a rapid escalation of the war in Ukraine that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people.
Yet U.S. lieutenant-General Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe, believes Russia won’t be able to overrun Ukraine. “There is nothing they can do. They do not have the ability to knock Ukraine out of the war,” he said.
“Now they are going to continue losing a thousand soldiers a day because they don’t care about their own casualties. But I don’t think that this is endless,” Hodges added.
It’s getting difficult for the outside world to monitor the war: Vadym Golda — who was a security assistant for the monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or OSCE, was sentenced to 16 years in prison by a court in the Russian occupied part of Donetsk on charges of spying.
He allegedly gathered information about industrial facilities later hit during the war. Golda was detained in September 2022 along with two other mission workers, both of whom were earlier sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The OSCE has demanded their immediate release.
Copyright 1999-2024 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
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